So I wrote a new introduction to the book. It’s about 4000 words, and for those of you who bought the book first time around and might otherwise feel a little bilked – or for anyone who is curious as to what kind of book this is – it’s downloadable as a .pdf here.

Change, in fact, is pretty much the way of things these days. And we’re not entirely factoring that into how we think about the world. We tend to assume that change will go on the way it has since we’ve been paying attention, but that’s a fallacy. If the rate of change continues to accelerate, that way of thinking has us underestimating how much of it there’ll be by some margin…

We’re in a very strange, very exciting time. Some people are predicting that change will start to slow – that digital technology has reached a sort of plateau. That may be true – although Moore’s Law is still going strong for now – but it ignores other, odder things like Synthetic Biology and Quantum Computing, and less weird but potentially hugely disruptive technologies like 3-D Printing.

Welcome to the revised Blind Giant website, by the way. It’s greyer and cooler than the first version (to match the paperback), and the forum’s gone. Why? Because it didn’t work. I should have realised that in the first instance. Why sign up to discuss something in a closed environment when the entire social web is there to have conversations in an open environment? Well, sure, there are some things you’d choose to discuss privately, but not this. So we iterated it right out of this version and the whole thing feels tighter and more defined.

Similarly, because I want to keep this space clean and shiny, I’ve been dumping interesting stuff directly to the Blind Giant tumblr – from TED talks about algorithms and architecture to footage of robotic exoskeletons and discussions of the power of big data. If you’re looking for new content, you can noodle on over there, or you can take a look at the chapter notes and links here on the main site. And, of course, you’re welcome to drop me a line on Twitter.